At first glance, the question seems ludicrous, even crazy. But bear with me and I will present good evidence that it may not be so ludicrous or crazy after all. Indeed, that single stark and simple question is not enough. I want to go further and ask:

Is Mikita Brottman a serial killer with a vile white-supremacist agenda?

Now the question may seem to some even ludicrouser. How on Gaia could Mikita Brottman be a serial killer, let alone a serial killer with a vile white-supremacist agenda? This mild-mannered literary scholar and yoga-enthusiast is a passionate member of the progressive community. She has a PhD in EngLit and another PhD in psychoanalysis. She is a committed reader of the Guardian and has been for decades. She was a core contributor to Cleaner, Kinder, Caringer: Women’s Wisdom for a Wounded World (2008). She has signalled her core commitment to progressive values in a thousand ways in a thousand venues.

Indeed she has. But is “signalled” not the operative word? I would suggest that Brottman, like countless other beneficiaries of white privilege, is an expert at camouflaging herself as progressive while making no real contribution to advancing the progressive agenda. For example, although Brottman has undoubtedly enjoyed white privilege all her life, she has never acknowledged this glaring fact, let alone sought to atone for it. And when she is called out for her white privilege, she resorts to the most disingenuous and transparent tactics of evasion. She has claimed in one interview: “I do not identify as ‘white’ – I identify as Freudian.”

What nonsense! As though Sigmund Freud is not a paradigmatic example of a Dead White European Male! Furthermore, Freud taught us to probe beneath the surface. If what is in the depths were invariably the same as what is on the surface, there would be no need to probe beneath the surface. Q.E.D. We should therefore be very suspicious of Brottman’s progressive veneer and of her claim “not [to] identify as ‘white’.” And that is even before we consider another core data-quantum: her move to the Black-majority city of Baltimore. What was she up to? Indeed, what is she up to? I would suggest that this recent headline provides us with a clue:

BALTIMORE (AP) — Baltimore could surpass New York City in homicides this year. The Baltimore Sun reports that for the first time Baltimore, with a population of less than 620,000, could record more murders in a single year than New York, which has a population of 8.5 million. As of Sept. 3, Baltimore has recorded 238 homicides, while New York City has seen 182 murders.

How on Gaia is it possible that Baltimore, with a population of less than a million, could ever record more murders than New York, with a population of over eight million? Well, vile white racists and white supremacists have an easy answer to that core question. They claim that it is the so-called “Ferguson Effect”, in which protests by the progressive organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) cause the de-policing of vulnerable districts in various American cities. Black-on-Black homicide rates then rise sharply and shockingly – according to the vile white racists and white supremacists.

I have a different and much more plausible theory: that the so-called “Ferguson Effect” is real, but caused not by Blacks homiciding other members of their Community, rather by homicidal white racists seeking to make BLM look bad. And how, you might quite reasonably ask, are homicidal white racists able to operate in vulnerable Black districts without being detected? I will let TransVisceral Books answer that question:

Baltimore Booty: An Anglo Academic Goes Undercover in Da Ghetto

Mikita Brottman’s über-controversial memoir of how she has regularly used skin-dye, wigs and prosthetic buttocks to enter and share the life of one of America’s most vulnerable Black communities. – TransVisceral publicity for Baltimore Booty (2016)

There you have it. On her own admission, Brottman has regularly operated “undercover” in Baltimore’s Black Community whilst wearing prosthetic buttocks in which it would be very easy to conceal lethal weaponry. Perhaps she carries a powerful handgun in the right cheek of her prosthetic buttocks and additional ammunition in the left cheek. Or vice versa. It is impossible to be sure. At this moment in time, we can only speculate as to the precise details of Brottman’s blood-soaked work on behalf of the white supremacist cause.

Nor am I, of course, seeking to suggest that Brottman could be solely responsible for the disturbingly anomalous increase in the Baltimore homicide rate. If my theory is correct, she would be merely one amongst a number of white racists operating in the Black Community while wearing similar disguises. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that she is the deadliest and most dedicated member of the right-wing death-squad.

And why should she have confined her atrocious attentions to Baltimore? It could very well be the case that this so-called “Anglo Academic” has been at work in other cities subject to the so-called “Ferguson Effect”, such as Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee. What can we conclude? It’s simple: Racism Never Sleeps. Nor must anti-racism. And I have only one thing left to say:

Stop.

The.

Brott.

*Simul-scribe of seminal snuff-study Killing for Culture: A Dysmorphic Duo of Death’n’Decomposition-Dedicated Deviants Called Dave Sniff Out the Slimiest Secrets of Snuff’n’Stuff (Visceral Visions 2016).

Note: Post the appalling news from America, we in the close-knit Papyrocentric community feel this is a highly appropriate moment to re-publish this searing indictment of racism, hate and Other-phobia first issued in 2005 by the literary activist Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum (who is, of course, the life-partner of longstanding Papyrocentric favorite Dr Miriam B. Stimbers).

Faut-il Brûler Smith? (Con)futing the Hate Speech of Klarkash-Ton

by Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum

The Other is a liminal mirror in which we see reflected nothing other than the faces, distorted with rage, fear, and doubt, of the sentries patrolling the ambiguous and disputed frontiers of the Self. — Michel Foucault.

In terms of key issues maximally impacting committed members of the equality-activist community in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, there can be little doubt that the keyest is the confrontation with hatred of the Other. Be it in the form of antisemitism, racism, xeno-, gyno-, homo-, and/or lesbophobia, Other-directed prejudice and bigotry is a feral cancer whose seething tentacles cement a visceral shadow as much over the future of western societies as over their past. Yet members of the literary-scholarship community find that their field of critical and theoretic focus, one of the principal means of leveraging progressive ideas/attitudes in terms of the body (socio-)politic, often proves a double-edged discourse.

In short, and to be blunt, many past writers/authors were vicious bigots and/or racists. Nor are participants in “fringe” genres such as Weird fiction, themselves marginalized by mainstream literary discourse, innocent of an identical charge. Members of the Internet community, whether knowingly or unknowingly, can access the following on the Eldritch Dark, the premier web-resource devoted to maximalizing engagement with the literary legacy of Clark Ashton Smith, a core member of the seminal 1920s/1930s Weird Tales literary community:

The vermin is a very Jew, and will have his last ounce of brain and marrow.1

I return the Ullman-Knopf communication herewith. Knopf should remove the Borzoi from his imprint, and substitute either the Golden Calf or a jackass with brazen posteriors. I wish Herr Hitler had him, along with Gernsback.2

Antisemitism, arguably the most feral of all Other-phobic discourses, is a pivotal strand in the fluidic œuvre of Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), a California poet/author now arguably most famous for his association with New England author/poet H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and Texas writer/author Robert E. Howard (1906-36). Lovecraft’s and Howard’s own and more obvious Other-phobia has been the epicenter of an unswerving critical dissection for a not inconsiderable time-period post the Civil Rights era/epoch, and I would suggest that Smith’s less obvious but arguably, for that very reason, even more pernicious Other-phobia has fallen into the penumbra cast by the brickbats rightly focused around Lovecraft and Howard. The present essay is an attempt, however tentative, inchoate, and embryonic, to corrective this situation and foreground the urgent need for unacceptable components/elements of Smith’s literary/epistolary output to be engaged on multiple levels by committed members of the anti-racist community.

Accordingly, I shall interrogate the conte fantastique by which arguably more than any other the feral parameters of Smith’s visceral Other-phobia can be mapped and/or charted: “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” (1936). Experienced literary exegetists need engage with no more than the title of this fictive discourse prior to commencing a deconstruction of its probable Other-phobic narrative strategies. We confront not ‘simply’ a chromatically unmarked “The Abbot of Puthuum,” nor a chromatically ‘neutral’ “The Red/Yellow/Blue Abbot of Puthuum,” but “The Black Abbot of Puthuum,” and the title immediately and explicitly conjuncts the racial Other of socially constructed Blackness with the textual Other of fictively constructed “Puthuum,” a factitious confection of visceral vocables nevertheless harboring feral echoes of “putridity-putrescence-putrefaction.”

Who could doubt, prior to embarking around a full engagement with Smith’s core narrative structure, that “The Black Abbot” will prove ‘Black’ by both socially constructed race but also by ideologically constructed nature, reinforcing/buttressing traditional Other-phobic discourses whereby Blackness is insolubly conjuncted with notions around soi disant ‘deviance’ and ‘criminality’? It comes as no surprise, then, for the attentive lectrice/lecteur, post reading-commencement, to confront the following literary tropes within the central core segment of the narrative proper:

The black man grinned capaciously, showing rows of discolored teeth whose incisors were like those of a wild dog. His enormous unctuousjowls were creased by the grin into folds of amazing number and volume; and his eyes, deeply slanted and close together, seemed to winkperpetually in pouches that shook like ebon jellies. His nostrils flaredprodigiously; his purple, rubbery lips drooled and quivered, and he lickedthem with a fat, red, salacious tongue before replying to Cushara’s question.3 (Emphases mine.)

We see here an ‘optimal’ conflation of feral Other-phobic narratives of race whose visceral impaction on the reader is rather increased than lessened by the formalism of Smith’s conflicted, eurocentric prose. Indeed, we note that the Abbot becomes not merely the racial Other but the mammalian Other: his dentition is that of a “wild dog,” not that of a human being, and the sexual components of the ‘discourse of deviance’ long woven by white Other-phobes around members of the Black community are signalized in the “fat, red, salacious tongue” with which the Abbot animalistically “licks” his “purple, rubbery lips.” Soon post this passage, the Abbot’s unbridled Other-sexuality is further emphasized/foregrounded as he becomes not merely the mammalian but the vertebral Other:

Neither he nor Zobal was reassured by the look of lust in the abbot’s obscenely twinkling eyes as he peered at Rubalsa. Moreover, they had now noted the excessive and disagreeable length of the dark nails on his huge hands and bare, splayed feet: nails that were curving, three-inchtalons, sharp as those of some beast or bird of prey. (Emphases mine.)

His visceral Otherness has become too ferally impactive to be confined within the anatomic/behavioral parameters of the class Mammalia (mammals) and is transferred even further, to those of the class Aves (birds). The Abbot’s subsequent attempts to both rape Rubalsa, the “queenly maiden” around whose non-consensual purchase and sex-trafficking the narrative centers, but also to murder and devour her ‘protectors’ are further cementings of Other-phobic racist discourses of Black promiscuity, violence, and cannibalism.

The multiply-stranded question that is begged by even a cursory interrogation of the soi disant “Black Abbot” is identical, mutatis mutandis, to that raised by French philosophe / critic / cultural commentatrice Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) in a key mid-twentieth-century text of theoretic and societo-literary engagement: the essay «Faut-il Brûler Sade?» (1951), or “Must We Burn de Sade?”. Here I ask «Faut-il Brûler Smith?» (2005), or “Must We Burn Smith?”. That is, is our objective of a progressive, egalitarian society in which the optimally-diverse value and contributions of all are of equal worth and standing maximally advanced by a visceral suppression of such feral tropes in the work of such writers/authors as Clark Ashton Smith?

Or must we seek another — and indeed anOther — means of transitioning key societal components to our desired post-racist, post-white-hegemonic end(s)? Attractive though the strategy of suppression must appear to those members of the progressive community who fully recognize the dangers of such hate speech, it is nevertheless incumbent on us to engage with issues around pragmatism and acknowledge the impossibility, at the present stage of societal evolution, of successfully fruitioning such a strategy.

Instead, we must adopt the strategy of confrontation and confutation, theorizing/triangulating Smith within the poly-dimensional temporal, societal, and ideological co-ordinates/parameters of his fluidic, polymorphic fictive and meta-cultural identities/personae and explicating, if by no means excusing, his profoundly regrettable co-optioning of Other-phobic discourses of antisemitism and racism.

You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, Anthony Burgess (Heinemann 1990)

After the excellent Little Wilson and Big God, this was a big disappointment. Burgess’s life before fame seems to have been much more interesting than his life after it. This is partly because of his wife before fame: the alcoholic Welshwoman Lynne Burgess, née Llewela Isherwood Jones, is much more memorable than the scholarly Italian Liana Burgess. He ended Little Wilson thinking that he had a year to live and a year to create a pension for Lynne.

That was in 1959, but he was still alive in 1968 when Lynne died of cirrhosis of the liver. Before that, again and again, “she drank deep” and “became fierce-eyed and lively, ready for argument, anecdote, fist-fights.” (Part 2, pg. 111) As Burgess says: “She was, God help her, never dull.” Nor was he. But his life became less interesting as his fame increased. Or perhaps he simply grew less interested in it. He evoked pre-war Manchester and post-war Malaya vividly in Little Wilson, but Italy, Malta, America and Monaco don’t live on the page here. This is a rare flash of memorability:

We were in brutal country [in Sicily], the land of the Mafia. Taking coffee in a side-street, we heard a young man, swarthy as an Arab, tell his friend of his forthcoming marriage. He was going to paint his penis purple, he said, and if his bride evinced surprise he was going to cut her throat. (Part 3, pg. 182)

I wonder if that was a joke when the young man noticed them eavesdropping. Elsewhere, Burgess encountered folk who were swarthier still. This is about his time as a “Distinguished Professor” at “New York City College”, where he gave a course on Shakespeare:

The sessions were held in a large lecture hall on Convent Avenue, and outside this lecture hall was a cashier’s office complete with guichet before which black students waited to receive a weekly subsistence allowance. Whether they were more than merely nominal students I never discovered; I know only that they waited with competing cassette recorders of the kind called ghetto blasters, and that their noise prevented me from making a start on my lecture. I rebuked them and received coarse threats in return, as well as scatological abuse which was unseemly in any circumstances but monstrous when directed at even an undistinguished professor. (Part Four, pp. 274-5)

If you are shocked and disgusted by such uncouth and uncivilized behaviour, imagine how the poor Black students must have felt. That was in 1973 and it’s sad to see that, nearly half-a-century later, the fetid stench of white supremacism hangs as heavy as ever on the air of American colleges.

Burgess plainly was – and plainly is – one of the white males responsible for this sorry situation. As both volumes of his autobiography reveal, he was much more concerned with literature, music and art than with social justice. Time and again he attempts to defend his white privilege and male privilege with appeals to universalism and the supremacy of the imagination. That defence isn’t good enough and perhaps, as his long day waned, he recognized his failure to fight for equality and was enervated by it. That would also explain why You’ve Had Your Time is so much duller than Little Wilson and Big God.

Encroaching senility is another explanation. In the introduction to this book, Burgess says one of the most fatuous things I have ever read: “I was in the Catholic church long enough to know that anyone may confess and, indeed, has to.” How long does one have to be in the Catholic church to know that? Or out of it? That’s writing on auto-pilot, like much of what follows. If you’re interested in Burgess, you should definitely read this book, but I’m certain that it doesn’t receive as many second and third readings as Little Wilson.

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Vox Day (Castalia House 2015)

If Vox Day didn’t exist, Social Justice Warriors wouldn’t want to invent him. Indeed, they wouldn’t be able to imagine him: a white racist, sexist and homophobe who isn’t just more intelligent, more knowledgeable and wittier than they are, but isn’t actually white. As he delights in telling them: he’s part Hispanic and part American Indian. Like Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay conservative who supplies the introduction for this book, Vox Day is a living refutation of the Social Justice Weltanschauung.

That’s part of why they hate him so much. You’ll understand the rest by reading SJWs Always Lie. He understands them much better than they understand him. In fact, they don’t understand him at all. That’s why he’s so effective in his attacks on them and they’re so ineffective in theirs on him. SJWs certainly win many battles, but many more of their victims might survive if they have a copy of this book to guide them. The number one rule is: Never apologize. The Nobel Laureates James Watson and Sir Tim Hunt and the Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich disobeyed that rule and paid the price:

Watson’s apology could not have been more abject. Eich’s sincerity and abasement before the thought police could not have been more genuine or more groveling. Hunt’s apology could not have come quicker. Yet none of them proved sufficient to even marginally reduce the amount of social pressure the SJWs continued to bring to bear on them – pressure that none of them proved able to successfully withstand. (ch. 3, “When SJWs Attack”, pg. 72)

SJWs say they want to make the world a cleaner, kinder, caringer place. In fact, they want power. Which means, inter alia, the power to humiliate and destroy people who are superior to them. Orwell described another aspect of their psychology like this:

Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

Unfortunately, Day’s writing isn’t as powerful and effective as Orwell’s. SJWs Always Lie isn’t badly written or painful to read, but it’s by no means as well-written and pleasurable as it could have been. The cartoons by Red Meat that begin each chapter are often crisper and clearer than the prose that follows. As Orwell points out in “Politics and the English Language” (1946): “When you are composing in a hurry … it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.” And Day certainly wrote this book in a hurry: I feel tired merely contemplating the amount he gets done not just as a writer but as a blogger, editor, gamer, and networker too.

Those are more reasons for SJWs to hate him. As a self-professed Christian, he shouldn’t hate them back and I think he mostly succeeds. But I also think he’s more Christianized than Christian. He’s pagan and aristocratic in his values, not humble or pacific. Nietzsche and Aristotle are much more apparent in his thinking and writing than Christ or St Paul: I can’t remember seeing “Molon labe, motherfuckers” in the Sermon on the Mount. But I have seen it at Day’s blog. If you visit the blog regularly, SJWs Always Lie will be reinforcement, not revelation, but by buying the book you support a very worthy cause. If one Vox Day can win endorsements like the following, imagine what ten or a hundred could do:

“Vox Day is one sick puppy.” – Dr. P.Z. Myers, PhD.

“Vox Day is a fascist mega-dickbag and less a human being than one long sequence of junk DNA.” – Dr. Phil Sandifer, PhD.

The answer to that last question is: the cuckservatives. A man isn’t known just by the company he keeps, but also by the opprobrium he heaps. After the SJWs, who better for Day to assail than the pseudo-conservatives of the Republican party? Like Nietzsche, Vox Day would be impossible to imagine if he didn’t exist. That’s why he’s memorable and that’s why he evokes such strong reactions, positive and negative. SJWs always lie and SJWs will always hate Vox Day. He wouldn’t want it any other way.

Mikita Brottman, the notorious “Beast of Baltimore”, is at it again. I have incisively interrogated and corrosively condemned this appalling woman’s crypto-racist and white-supremacist tendencies twice before on Papyrocentric Performativity, in “YaC Attack” and “Knowing Mi, Knowing Yoom”.

But it has made no difference.

In fact, Brottman has plumbed new depths, luring a well-intentioned (but obviously weak-minded) younger woman into her fetid swamp of crypto-fascism. Please examine the following text, class, taken from a web-site set up by Brottman to lure more innocent victims into her white-supremacist web:

When you think of psychologists and clinicians, you probably think of middle-aged men in suits and ties. We are different. We are females with aesthetic inclinations. Our work is intuitive, eclectic, flexible, and doesn’t rely on logic, science, or empirical studies. When it comes to human relationship dynamics, logic doesn’t apply. We rely on other skills: creative thinking, imagination, symbolic and aesthetic awareness, and unconscious perception. (Meet the Team @ Vas Nefandum)

Did you spot it? Did you? In the first two lines? Yes, that’s right: a clear case of suggestio falsi (in line 2) by suppressio veri (in line 1). Look at that disgustingly deceitful claim: “When you think of psychologists and clinicians, you probably think of middle-aged men in suits and ties.”

In fact, no, I don’t think of “middle-aged men”. And neither do you – or anyone else. It’s impossible to think of just “middle-aged men” – psychologically im-possi-bubble. As the Brott-Beast is very well aware, the men hafta have a color. And in this case, it’s a very particular color. The first line shoulda read like this:

When you think of psychologists and clinicians, you probably think of middle-aged white men in suits and ties.

See? White men! That’s what you think of when you think of psychologists and clinicians: white men. But why did the Brott-Beast suppress the truth? ’Coz otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to make this mephitically mendacious claim: “We are different.” ’Coz in fact they aren’t different. The Brott-Beast and her dupe are also white. In the immortal words of The Bay City Rollers:

Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss.

The Beast of Baltimore (artist’s impression)

The Brott-Beast is not going to give up her white privilege until they prise it from her cold dead fingers. That’s why she pretends that’s she “different”, just ’coz she’s a white woman rather than a white man.

And that’s also why, no doubt, she has chosen to live in Baltimore, where vulnerable Black Bodies are tortured and trashed on a daily – indeed, hourly – basis by the brutal police hegemons of white supremacism.

The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs, Mikita Brottman (William Collins 2014)

Unlike her fellow Oxonian Miriam Stimbers, Mikita Brottman has never seemed a plausible figure to me. Is she for real? Or is she in fact an under-cover performance artist parodying a neurotic Guardian-reading psychoanalyst with a PhD in the humanities? Will she unmask herself one day in dramatic circumstances at a conference engaging issues around post-Foucauldian hermeneutics? I’ve always had my suspicions.

Those suspicions were only deepened by The Great Grisby. This book is so Guardianista I half expected it to come with a free beard-trimmer and packet of fair-trade organic tampons. There’s no foreword by Polly Toynbee or afterword by Jonathan Freedland, but believe me: there should have been. The hum of the hive-mind was particularly loud in passages like this:

When you think about it, the idea of gangsters emerging from the ghetto to steal “our” innocent pets is really absurd; what’s more, it bespeaks all kinds of race and class anxieties. These sensitive issues also saturate the discourse around pit bull “rescue” campaigns, in which dogs are taken from young black men in the city’s run-down neighborhoods, inoculated, bathed, “altered”, given friendly names, adopted by middle-class families, and taken to live in the suburbs. We do to the dogs what we want to do to the barbarians who breed them: make them submit. (ch. 2, “Bull’s-eye”, pg. 20)

You can picture Guardianistas and NYT-wits nodding their heads wisely at that passage, then tutting sadly for the thousandth time over white racism. When will it end? When will the rainbow society begin and the Black Community be released from Its millennial bondage? But, as a keyly (and corely) committed anti-racist, I call bullshit. Ms B is pretending concern for Yoot-a-Color (YaC) while actually erecting toxic barriers to their participation in her own sunny world of white privilege.

Why do I say this? Simple. Look at the passage again. Note the verb “bespeaks” and the phrase “saturate the discourse around”. Guardianistas don’t notice the irony of expressing concern about Da Ghetto while using pretentious academic jargon so white it glows in the dark. Ms B’s own language is expressing a clear attitude towards YaC: she, from her lofty perch of white privilege, understands what causes their misery and deplores the hegemonic racism that systematically oppresses them.

Meanwhile, her actions speak louder than her words: she continues to benefit from that white hegemony and the unearned privilege it bestows 24/7/52 on jargon-juicing Guardianistas such as herself. This book is in fact an unabashed celebration of both the hegemony and the privilege. It interrogates issues around a series of white dog-owners and their dogs, with a nigh-on-nauseating emphasis on Dead White European Males like Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud and Schopenhauer.

Blitz – as he’s usually called – now travels extensively with Lemmy and the boys. As you’ll readily imagine, it can get LOUD even backstage at a Motörhead gig and after some failed experiments with adapted ear-plugs and ear-muffs, Lemmy commissioned a special “acoustically opaque” sleeping-box for Blitz, in which, having been fed some doggie-chocs soaked with a herbal calmative, he’ll comfortably snooze out the earsplitting riffs of “Ace of Spades” and “Bomber” until the gig is over and he’s re-united with his besotted – and beloved – owner. With typical gruff honesty, Lemmy has declared that he prefers his dog to 99.9% of human beings: “There’s no bullshit with the bugger and I’m sure he’d lay down his fucking life for me, just as I’d lay down mine for him.” (ch. 7, “Blitzkrieg”, pg. 60)

Jesus. Could you get any whiter than heavy metal, herbal calmatives and truffle-hounds called Blitzkrieg? The closest Ms B gets to a Person of Color is Frida Kahlo. Which isn’t close enough, in my opinion. Interspersed with discussion of these hideously white dog-owners are Ms B’s musings on her own dog (now deceased). It was a French bulldog called Grisby, whose name came – in achingly arch Guardianista fashion – from a French film. But it gets worse. Grisby was a white French bulldog – just look at the cover. And the white dog/god is on a pedestal, forsooth! Could Ms B’s Eurocentric white-supremacist agenda be any clearer?

No. But think what this book could have been about. Rather than portraying a pampered pooch and writing about her fellow white privilegees, Ms B could have adopted an autistic Somali orphan with a missing limb and alopecia, recorded the child’s inspirational upbringing, and launched a real challenge to white supremacy and white privilege. Just think what a book that would have made. Instead, she chose to reinforce the white hegemonic power-structure while making vacuous rhetorical gestures towards solidarity with the ghetto.

I’m no expert in her work, but I don’t think the Anglo-American academic Mikita Brottman is a very coherent or profound thinker. Yes, she’s brighter than David Kerekes or Jack Sargeant, but that’s not difficult and her academic specialities prove that she doesn’t know where to draw the comedic line. Being a PhD in EngLit is a good joke. Being a psychoanalyst is a good joke. Being both is grotesque to the point of vulgarity. And vice versa. However, despite all that, I did at least think Ms B was a Good Persun – an Obama-voter, an egalitarian, someone who wanted to make the world a cleaner, kinder, caringer place.

Yes, that’s what I thought.

Then I came across Thirteen Girls, her study of thirteen female murder-victims. I’ve not read the book and I don’t intend to: I got bored with true crime a long time ago. But I don’t need to read the book to be aghast at its ideology. Okay, at first glance, it further exposes the Evil White Male, or EWM/Yoom, and his Evil White Maleness, or Yoomness. But let’s not beat about the bush, or the Brottman: this book buttresses white privilege. And hyper-hypocritically so:

When describing Thirteen Girls, I often refer to Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus,” in which ordinary people go about their daily routines, barely noticing the tragedy taking place in the background. My students get the analogy immediately, but in the narrow world of publishing and the marketplace, the concept of an unobserved tragedy is definitely not a selling point. (“The Afterlife of Murder”, Mikita Brottman)

Oh, yeah? So Ms Brottman thinks she’s interrogating issues around unobserved tragedy and lives that are lost without the wider world noticing. But all the victims in this book are white. All thirteen of them.Every last flipping one. Even in death, they are benefiting from white privilege and the racist hegemonic mindset that dictates who is seen as Important and who is not. What about the countless Victims of Color (VoC) raped and murdered by Yooms on a daily, indeed hourly, basis? Huh? It is no excuse – no excuse at all – that Brottman is herself not a Woman of Color (WoC). That merely makes it worse. Herself having white privilege, Brottman has used it to buttress the bestial, rather than vocalizing the VoC and interrogating the evil of the Yoom in its full horror. The clear message of this book is that Yoomness only matters if it is directed at white women.

We can see the same message in a recent news-story from South Africa. First, consider a simple fact: not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Black women have been raped or murdered there by the legacy of apartheid since Yoom fascism was toppled in 1994. But none of that has received a fraction as much attention as the death of a single woman called Reeva Steenbock earlier in 2013. Why? Because Reeva Steenbock was the white girlfriend of a famous white man. And when a Black death does receive publicity – someone was recently tied to a police van and dragged to death by the legacy of apartheid – guess what? The Black victim was male.

This book is another example of that noxious narrative and of the refusal of white-privileged women to show solidarity with VoC’s and stand with them against the Yoom and his Yoomness. There are no two ways about it: Brottman is reinforcing racism, facilitating fascism and nurturing Nazism. And if you think I’m being hyperbolic, consider another simple fact: Nine-Banded Books, the Yoom publisher of Mikita Brottman, is also the publisher of Jonathan Bowden. An infamous fascist philosophaster. Coincidence? I fear not. Ms Brottman needs to repent her white privilege, denounce her publisher and start working against the Yoom, not on behalf of him.

Want to see how a genuinely decent and progressive writer does that? Then look no further than Dr Miriam B. Stimbers and her just-published Re-Light My Führer: Nausea, Noxiousness and Neo-Nazism in the Music(k) of Take That, 1988-2007. Now, there is a woman whose ethics I can respect.